"Iridescent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... starlings do not hawk for insects. Held up by the excitement—for by this time other birds have darted to the feast—the starlings alight among the plumes of the laburnum, interrogating in acidulous tones, their black, burnished, iridescent feathers and flame-hued eyes making a picture of rare vividness ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... fanned by a dozen gaudily-attired negroes, was a dark-faced, full-bearded man of middle age, whose black eyes regarded us keenly as we entered. He was dressed in a robe of bright yellow silk, and in his turban there glittered a single diamond that sparkled and gleamed with a thousand iridescent rays. His fat brown hand was loaded with rings, and jewels glittered everywhere upon his belt, his sword, and his ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... but marvellously consistent with itself. It was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active childish brain that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor feared nor passionately loved,—a web of iridescent threads. He had luminous final theories about Love and Death and Immortality, odd matters they seemed for him to think about! and all his woven thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... that famous tribute to womanhood which goes by the name of 'Dignity of Women'. Looked at with the scientific eye it is sheer gyneolatry,—the chivalrous sentiment inflated with poetic wind, like a bubble, to the utmost possible degree of iridescent tenuity. Man is depicted as a wild creature, ever tossing on the sea of passion, or chasing phantoms in the empyrean. Reckless and vehement, he lives by the law of force, or, at the best, by the law of reason and logic. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... indifferent attention to Monsieur Verlaque's explanations. A flood of sunshine suddenly streamed through the lofty glass roof of the covered way, lighting up all these precious colours, toned and softened by the waves—the iridescent flesh-tints of the shell-fish, the opal of the whiting, the pearly nacre of the mackerel, the ruddy gold of the mullets, the plated skins of the herrings, and massive silver of the salmon. It was as though the jewel-cases of some sea-nymph ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... following description, unless otherwise stated, refers to A. lanceolatus. Amphioxus is a small fish-like creature attaining a maximum length of about 3 in., semitransparent in appearance, showing iridescent play of colour. The body is narrow, laterally compressed and pointed at both ends. The main musculature can be seen through the thin skin to be divided into about sixty pairs of muscle-segments (myotomes) by means of comma-shaped ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... A very pretty species, row deep fish. brownish back, marked faintly Perilamp. An both longitudinally and Opsarion? transversely with iridescent patches, abdominal fins reddish. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... agglomeration of life was in form like a bunch of grapes, and where it thinned away to a point the bees dropped off by their own weight into the grass below, then rose again and either flew aloft in wide and circling flight or rushed headlong upon the swarm once more. Across the iridescent cluster passed a gleam and glow of peacock and iris, opal and mother-of-pearl; while from its heart ascended a deep murmur, telling of tremendous and accumulated energy suddenly launched into this peaceful glade of apple-blossom ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... said to one another the gods. And looking downwards, for my dreams had taken me to some fair and far Valhalla, I saw below me an iridescent bubble not greatly larger than a star shine beautifully but faintly, and up and up from it looking larger and larger came a flock of white, innumerable swans, singing and singing and singing, till ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... through my soul tonight, You in your gown, impossibly white— I marvel greatly that it fail To glow and pale With iridescent light— How can it hang in silent nun-like folds? Think of the flaming mystery it ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... through a powerful lens, the heart of the flower, which, to the naked eye, lies flooded in a warm, colorless light, assumes the most exquisite iridescent hues, far more beautiful than the defined tints of the passion-flower. Melting to the eye in its juiciness and delicacy, yet firm in its pure outline and rounded finish, it bears the same relation to that chosen type of the great Suffering, that ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... torpid and sunken sun, Mael saw, rising above the waves, the silent streets of a white city, which, vaster than Thebes with its hundred gates, extended as far as the eye could see the ruins of its forum built of snow, its palaces of frost, its crystal arches, and its iridescent obelisks. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... away to the size of wires at the bottom where they entered the stone, the condensed breathings of generations having settled there in pools and rusted them. The panes themselves had either lost their shine altogether or become iridescent as a peacock's tail. In the middle of the porch was a vertical sun-dial, whose gnomon swayed loosely about when the wind blew, and cast its shadow hither and thither, as much as to say, 'Here's your fine model dial; here's any time for any man; I am ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... a little artificial. Actual games of the kind I am illustrating here have been played by us, many and many a time, with joy and happy invention and no thought of publication. They have gone now, those games, into that vaguely luminous and iridescent into which happiness have tried out again points in world of memories all love-engendering must go. But we our best to set them and recall the ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells
... vanity. The tint of the clear iris suggested sea shallows on a day of light cloud—more green than blue; yet with just enough of the sky's own colour to lend the charm of a constant variability, that harmonised admirably with her iridescent ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... been drawn off, there is a moment's pause, and then a new cascade begins. The steel is beginning to flow, not in a daffodil stream like the slag, but in a cascade of exquisite turquoise blue, melting away at the sides into iridescent opal. Sometimes a great cloud of steam from the pit below passes across the mouth of the crucible, and then the torrent of molten steel takes on all the colours of the rainbow, and the great shed, with its alert, ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... eyes there dwelt not the Milla Rust who sat beside him, but an iridescent, fragile ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... less pain than he had expected. Around him the frost-smitten aspens were shivering in the wind, their sparse leaves dangling like coins of red-and-yellow gold, and all the billowing land below, to the west, was iridescent with green and flame-color and crimson. A voiceless regret, a dim, wide-reaching, wistful sadness came over him, but did not shake his resolution. He had but to look down at his crippled body to know that the beauty of the world was no longer his to enjoy. His days ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... acuminata. This grows to a length of four feet eight inches, the tail alone being twenty-two inches; but the diameter of the thickest part of the body is little more than a quarter of an inch. It is of light-brown colour, with iridescent shades variegated with obscurer markings, and looks like a piece of whipcord. One individual which I caught of this species had a protuberance near the middle of the body. Upon opening it, I found a half-digested ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... miller's daughter, to occupy all her mind with, innocent of troubles concerning the Turkish question; steady-going old Barham, confessing nobody but the Jackdaw of Rheims, and fearless alike of Ritualism, Darwinism, or disestablishment; iridescent clearness of Thomas Hood—the wildest, deepest infinity of marvelously jestful men; manly and rational Sydney, inevitable, infallible, inoffensively wise of wit;[3]—they are gone their way, and ours is far diverse; and they and all the less-known, yet pleasantly ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and on, into the city, down the wide streets, walled with soaring buildings that shone with an iridescent lustre, toward the great domed building I had seen ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... of childhood are a web Of gossamer, most infinitely frail And tender, shot with gleaming threads of gold And silver, through the iridescent weft Of subtlest tints of azure and of rose; Woven of fragile nothings, yet most dear, As binding us to that dim, far-off time, When first our lungs inhaled the fragrance sweet Of a new world, where all was bright and fair. As we approach the end of mortal things, The band of comrades ever ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... drifting heart longing to anchor on to something, I traced my steps towards the inner gardens. I was very fond of chrysanthemums and had rows of them, of all varieties, banked up in pots against one of the garden walls. When they were in flower, it looked like a wave of green breaking into iridescent foam. It was some time since I had been to this part of the grounds, and I was beguiled into a cheerful expectancy at the thought of meeting my chrysanthemums ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... in vogue among Fuegian belles for neck adornment is a pearl oyster (Margarita violacea) of an iridescent purplish colour, and about half an inch in diameter. It is found adhering to the kelp, and forms the chief food of several kinds of seabirds, among others the "steamer-duck." Shells and shell-fish play a large part in Fuegian domestic (!) economy. A large kind of barnacle (Concholepas Peruviana) ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... whose ice-cream and strawberries she was going to eat, provided she got them and they were good. Besides, it would be like finding an old lost friend to look into her mirror (it was cracked and turned one's complexion pale green, with iridescent spots; but that was a detail) and see a bare-necked, white-armed girl in ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... and only then. But the flashes were more brilliant than the rainbow—purest blue, most delicate violet, brightest yellow, and all the intermediary shades, with the scintillant brilliancy of the diamond, dazzling, blinding, iridescent. ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... ascetic idea inherent in Christianity, [576] are not ashamed of the sensual appetite, but rather the reverse." [577] Nafzawi, indeed, praises Allah for amorous pleasures just as other writers have exhausted the vocabulary in gratitude for a loaded fruit tree or an iridescent sunset. His mind runs on the houris promised to the faithful after death, and he says that these pleasures are "part of the delights of paradise awarded by Allah as a foretaste of what is waiting for us, namely delights a thousand times superior, and above which only the sight ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... nation. The old order based on slavery and environment; the handicap of "previous condition" has passed. Will never return! THAT, or the "Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man" is, and always was, an iridescent dream; ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... the joyous company was likewise the bearer of a toy balloon—red, yellow, blue, green, or purple, as the case might be. Over the line of heads the taut rubbery globes rode on their tethers, nodding and twisting like so many big iridescent bubbles; and half a block away, at the edge of the lot, a balloon vender, whose entire stock had been disposed of in one splendid transaction, now stood, empty-handed but full-pocketed, marveling ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... me," said Querida, showing his snowy teeth, "I often sicken of my fat sunlight, frying everything to an iridescent omelette." He shrugged, laughed: "I turn lazy for months every year. Try it, my friend. ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... iridescent crystals to the grass, where the sheep were already wide-awake and eager at their breakfasts; it gleamed like sprinkled rubies on the scarlet petals of the poppies, and like fairies' draughts of yellow wine in the enamelled hollows of the buttercups; on the brown earth ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a 'many-faced and fickle traitor,' but at least it is a better aim than to be a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... She had some big bright-yellow chrysanthemums stuck in her belt. She wore no hat. Her hair, brown and warm in shadow, sparkled, where the sun touched it, transparent and iridescent, like crinkly ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... gliding, gleaming, melting; crystallizing for an instant in some savory phrase, then moving quiveringly onward. It is well-nigh edgeless. It seems to flow through our perceptions as water flows through fingers. The iridescent bubbles that float upon it burst if we but touch them. It is forever suggesting water—fountains and pools, the glistening spray and heaving bosom of the sea. Or, it shadows forth the formless breath of the breeze, of the storm, of perfumes, or the play of sun and moon. His orchestration invariably ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... glued tightly on a golden box, Whose rare enamel piqued her with its hue, Changeable, iridescent, shuttlecocks Of shades and lustres always darting through Its level, superimposing sheet of blue, Charlotta did not hear footsteps approaching. She started at the ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... bare brown rock that pierce the clouds floating along the range. At sunrise they cast immense shadows upon the mesa spreading westward from their base; and at sunset they reflect golden and purple glows upon the plain until the earth appears swimming in some iridescent sea of ether; while over them from dawn till dusk, traversed by a few fleecy clouds, lies the turquoise sky ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... to do it,' commented Henry, looking at a few iridescent bubbles at the bottom of the ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... with the October coloring. The oak in regal purple stood outlined against the beech in cloth-of-gold, while green-flecked hickory and elm, and iridescent silver and scarlet ash, and flaming maple added to the ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... almost imperceptibly. Gerald could see, not far ahead, the rich blue and the rose globes of Ursula's lanterns swaying softly cheek to cheek as Birkin rowed, and iridescent, evanescent gleams chasing in the wake. He was aware, too, of his own delicately coloured lights casting ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... show by way of proof before I lay such a tale before my fellow-men. It is true that others will soon follow and will confirm what I have said, and yet I should wish to carry conviction from the first. Those lovely iridescent bubbles of the air should not be hard to capture. They drift slowly upon their way, and the swift monoplane could intercept their leisurely course. It is likely enough that they would dissolve in the heavier layers of the atmosphere, and that some small heap of amorphous jelly might be all ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... happy wonder, the swelling film of soapy water into whose iridescent globe he has blown the speck from the bowl of the pipe. But this amazing development around us is not of airy and vanishing films. It is solidly constructed, in marble and brick, in stone and iron, ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... time, the rank grass is of a deeper green, and the face of the salt-meadows is seamed with irregular clay-brown channels, which at high-tide show out like crows'-feet on an ancient countenance, but at the ebb dwindle to little gullies with greasy-looking banks and a dribble of iridescent water in the bottom. It is in the autumn that the moles heap up meanders of miniature barrows, built of the softest brown loam; and in the turbaries the turf-cutters pile larger ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... heightened in beauty and power. Such sudden glints of sunshine in the offing through unseen rents of heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, I have beheld a thousand times, but here they remind me rather of cloud-lights on far western plains; and where have I seen those still tracts of changeful colour, iridescent under the silvery vapours of noon; or, when the weather freshens darkens, those whirlpools of pure emerald in the gray expanse of storm? They seem like memories of what has been, made fairer. One recurring scene has the same fascination for my eyes as the fishers' lights. It is a simple ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Whether the glittering iridescent tints and singular ornaments for which this family is famous result from the cumulative process of conscious or voluntary sexual selection, as Darwin thought, or are merely the outcome of a superabundant vitality, as Dr. A. R.. Wallace so strongly maintains, is a question which science ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... one place; "buff or light brown," in another place; "chocolate-colored and silky to the touch and slightly iridescent"; "gray"; "red-rust color"; "reddish raindrops and gray sand"; "dirty gray"; "quite red"; "yellow-brown, with a tinge of pink"; ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... ahead, not of the gigantic forest trees, but of lesser growths, bearing flowers and fruits of iridescent colors, and a tiny brook bubbled through. And there stood the objective of their journey—a building of white, marble-like stone, single-storied and vine covered, with broad glassless windows. They trod ...
— Pygmalion's Spectacles • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... she answered, and suddenly a rising wind blew all the strands of her hair into a cloud of gold, so that her coarse wool dress appeared brocaded; and while she was thus sumptuously clothed a great peacock in iridescent array strutted by her, and she placed her gloved hand for a moment on his shining feathers, looking, indeed, a princess. Back of her the courtiers stared and rubbed their eyes. The three slim boys on the ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... Indeed, when the iridescent bubble of reputation floated out from her modest dressmaking rooms in East Twenty-third Street, Millie Moores, whom youth had rushed past, because she had no leisure for it, felt her heart open like a grateful flower when life brought her more chores to do. And when ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... fireworks, vast shadow-pictures, scarlet cities, and gigantic figures stalking across the sky. From one crater of embers he shot up a fan-like flame that spread to the zenith and was reflected on the water. His rays lay along the sea in pink, and the water had the sheen of iridescent glass. The whole sea for leagues was like this; even Lemnos and Samothrace lay in a dim pink and purple light in the east. There were vast clouds in huge walls, with towers and battlements, and in all fantastic shapes—one a gigantic cat ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... inexhaustible. He was as much at ease in such surroundings as these in which he now found himself as a trout in a sandpile. The great room, with its costly furnishings, the tea-table crowded with silver and fragile porcelain, the kettle purring contentedly above the iridescent flame of the alcohol lamp,—above all, the subtle, indefinable suggestion of femininity which unknowably pervaded his surroundings,—all these enthralled young Nisbet beyond expression, and awed him immeasurably, into the bargain. He was, as ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... the centre room stood open, a characteristic room, half drawing-room, half studio; furnished mainly with two large easels, painting-stools, and cane chairs, yet bearing in every detail the stamp of Quita's iridescent personality. A pianette, a violin, a litter of music, and back numbers of the 'Art Journal' occupied one corner. A revolving bookcase showed an inviting array of books. Her own canvas was hidden by draperies ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... him. To revenge himself he laid penny crackers under their pedestals. His whole intellectual fortune was spent in buying penny crackers. There was something cheeky and pre-adolescent about him—a kind of virginal ferocity. That iridescent charm of sexlessness which somebody, one of these days, must be good enough to analyse for us! He lacked the male attributes of humility, reverence and ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... politics Is an iridescent dream," Is the Ingalls way of saying that Corruption's ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... their mute intervals fell upon them. Dozens of waves flashed and crashed their way up the beach; but now they trailed an iridescent network of foam over the lilac-gray sand. The sun raced high; but now it poured a flood of light on the green-gray water. The air grew bright and brighter. The earth grew warm and warmer. Blue came into the sky, deepened—and the sea reflected it, Suddenly the world was ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... on the beach and in the tiny main street bought meat, vegetables, and half a dozen eggs. Billy had to drag Saxon away from the window of a fascinating shop where were iridescent pearls of ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... traces of ancient peoples we find local artistic types of work, of furniture, of poetic songs and popular music. This multiform creation of the inner man, then, enfolds him and protects his spirit in its intellectual needs, just as the iridescent shell encloses ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... once more. He cut off a piece of the hide two feet square. He took only the outer hide, which was dry and which held the great iridescent scales that formed isotopes after death. From some marsh-bamboo and some wire-vines he formed a shield. By that time it was midnight. He turned his light on the pool where the saurian had been, and shuddered. The water was dull red, and alive with creatures ...
— The Wealth of Echindul • Noel Miller Loomis
... on his right, through which we peered into a long, lovely room, gleaming with iridescent hues and sparkling with touches of gold and crystal. The bed was draped with cloudy lace through which a shimmer of pale rose-colour made itself visible, and the carpet of dark moss-green formed a perfect setting for the quaintly shaped ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... all. The black shadows had fallen from him; he had left them with Flint; and a bright day had dawned within him and without him. Everything was tinged with iridescent light, for he looked at the world, as it were, through dew-drops. Happy morning—happy life! when one can put aside the trailing vines of painful memory, and let the warm sunshine of Heaven find its ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Giottesque colour, though here you have to mourn over the smallness of the piece, and its isolation. For the face of St. Francis himself is repainted, and all the blue sky; but the clouds and four sustaining angels are hardly retouched at all, and their iridescent and exquisitely graceful wings are left with really very tender and delicate care by the restorer of the sky. And no one but Giotto or Turner could ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... deep itself had sometimes the unreality, the artificiality of the canvas sea of the theatre. Commonly it was livid and cold in color; but there was a morning when it was delicately misted, and where the mist left it clear, it was blue and exquisitely iridescent under the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by the falling spray. These were rare moments; mostly, when it was not like painted canvas, is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smooth cleavage. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... bullfight; they risked their money perhaps on the result, but that was all. And such ideas of war as the common Americans possessed were derived from the limited, picturesque, adventurous war of the past. They saw war as they saw history, through an iridescent mist, deodorised, scented indeed, with all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away. They were inclined to regret it as something ennobling, to sigh that it could no longer come into their own private experience. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... to cash and sent Willie across the street to the bank to have it certified. The sun was just sinking over the Jersey shore beyond the Statue of Liberty and the surface of the harbor undulated like iridescent watered silk. The clouds were torn into golden-purple rents, and the air was so clear that one could look down the Narrows far out to the open sea. Standing there by the window Mrs. Allison looked as innocently beautiful ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... wordy, it gets the effect of the thing—faith, sirs, it's right on to the end of it every time! The writing of some folk is nothing but a froth of words—lucky if it glistens without, like a blobber of iridescent foam. But in this sketch there's a perception at the back of every sentence. It displays, indeed, too nervous a ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... of his other works. They are fresh and untrammeled in their development, and as full of sunlight as the nocturnes are of darkness. The one in A flat major was dedicated to the Countess de Loban as a wedding present, and was a farewell to her as a pupil. Brilliant, joyous and iridescent in its opening and closing sections, that in the middle voices vague and tender regret. The composition sometimes is spoken of as the "Trilby" impromptu. It is the one Du Maurier made Trilby sing under the ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... threefold hunt was over; the porpoises turned out to sea in search of fresh quarry; and the seine, dragged by ready hands, came slowly, stubbornly in with its quivering treasure of fish. They had sought a haven and found none; the brit lay dying in flickering iridescent heaps as the bare-legged babies of the village gathered them up; and far away over the water I saw a single grey speck; it was ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... before it actually exists. He must have seen all the glories of the material universe, worlds upon worlds circling through space, moon and stars, the beauty of forest and stream, of tinted flower and iridescent insect wing before they were brought into being, and He had the power to create them. Man has this wonderful gift of imagination. The inventor sees the machine in his thought before he attempts to build it. The poet has the germ of his poem in mind, even the ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... way to call even his youngest and rashest brother a fool, ruins thereby the joy of his journey,—for youth is so vivid an element in life that unless it is cherished, all the rest is spoiled. The most praiseworthy journey grows dull and leaden unless companioned by youth's iridescent dreams. Not only that, but the mature of each generation run a grave risk of putting their efforts in a futile direction, in a blind alley as it were, unless they can keep in touch with the youth of their own day and know at least the trend in which eager dreams are driving ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... rise from its ashes with all its phoenix-egg domes,—bubbles of wealth that broke, ready to be blown again; iridescent as ever, which is pleasant, for the world likes cheerful Mr. Barnum's success; New Haven, girt with flat marshes that look like monstrous billiard-tables, with hay-cocks lying about for balls,—romantic with West Rock and its legends,—cursed with a detestable depot, whose niggardly arrangements ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the book at an attractive illustration of an immense butterfly, with wings of iridescent blue and green. He could not stay, but he left the cherished volume open ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... beauty of that viper, did it never occur to you to change personalities with him? to feel what it was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death? In short, did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while in the carefree, joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... although he had not seen her features clearly, he felt a great surprise. His preconceived notion of her had been all wrong; It seemed, for she was not dark—on the contrary, she was as tawny as a lioness. Her hair, of which there was an abundance, was not the ordinary Saxon yellow, but iridescent, as if burned by the fierce heat of a tropical sun. The neck and cheeks were likewise golden, or was it the light ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... the bird is no great distance. Then the Wood-pigeon's iridescent hues, the eyes on the Peacock's tail, the Kingfisher's sea-blue, the Flamingo's carmine are more or less closely connected with the urinary excretions? Why not? Nature, that sublime economist, delights in these vast antitheses which upset all ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... formed in the electric furnace, is a beautiful crystalline semi-metallic solid, having a density of 2.22, and showing a fracture which is often shot with iridescent colours. It can be kept unaltered in dry air, but the smallest trace of moisture in the atmosphere leads to the evolution of minute quantities of acetylene and gives it a distinctive odour. It is infusible at temperatures up to 2000 deg. C., but can he fused ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the long, poplar-lined road from —— his heart is stirred with the romance of his mission. It is morning and he is bound for the trenches; the early sunshine is tangled in the branches, and silvery gossamer, beaded with iridescent jewels of dew, hang fairylike from the green leaves. Birds are singing, crickets are thridding in the grass and the air is full of the minute clamouring, murmuring and infinitesimal shouting of little living things. Cool, ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... marked, have a large crest, and are iridescent with all colors of the rainbow. They frequent wooded country near ponds and lakes, feeding on water insects and mollusks in the coves. They build their nests in hollow trees and stumps, often at quite a distance from the water. When the young ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... sky, and through the spattered water in the basin he can see copper carp, lazily floating among cold leaves. A wind-harp in a cedar-tree grieves and whispers, and words blow into his brain, bubbled, iridescent, shooting up like flowers of fire, higher and higher. Boom! The flame-flowers snap on their slender stems. The fountain rears up in long broken spears of disheveled water and flattens into the earth. Boom! And there is only the room, the table, ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... been traversing the moor for miles in search of wild duck and teal, a waterman, and a small spaniel. In the corner stood their guns, and two or three wild mallards, which represented the scanty product of their morning's labour, the iridescent necks of the dead birds replying to every flicker of the fire. The two sportsmen were smoking, and their man was mostly occupying himself in poking and stirring the fire with a stick: all three appeared ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... round an instant later, saw that masks and dominoes had disappeared. Opposite to him stood Valerie Selpdorf in a dress of some deep velvety shade, which bore, wrought upon its texture here and there, tiny horseshoes embossed in iridescent jewels. A diadem of the same shape crowned her dark hair. Yet all the richness and delicacy of the blended colourings struck Rallywood with only one odd remembrance—his own boot-heel outlined in Revonde mud upon a long suede glove. The same association apparently occurred ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... order that when he was drowning and at his last gasp, he might catch sight of a bit of ice, the size of a pea, but pure and crystal "as a frozen tear," and in that tear was reflected Germany, or more accurately the sky of Germany, and its iridescent sparkle recalled to his mind the very tear which "dost thou remember, fell from thine eyes when we were sitting under that emerald tree, and thou didst cry out joyfully: 'There is no crime!' 'No,' I said through my tears, 'but if that is so, there are no ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... almost full, and Harry took admiringly into his hand the great piece of rock representing the half of a mass of stone that had been accidentally broken in two, and found to contain a considerable quantity of iridescent, many-hued crystal. The next chest contained some very fine specimens of sapphire; but it was little more than half-full, the mine having only been discovered within the last decade, and even then not very industriously ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... the sud-spume flew like shreds of cotton; iridescent foam set with bubbles swirled in the stone-edged basin, constantly swept away down stream by the current, constantly renewed as she soaped and scrubbed, kneeling there in the meadow grass ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... relations were as the house of cards of fellowship: cards of glass, iridescent and brittle, mocking the idea that there could be oblivion of the scene in Lang's store, the crack of Leddy's pistol in the arroyo, or the pulse of Jack's artery under her thumb! She was sure that he could forget these experiences, even if ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... faster, flinging itself into the shadowy gorge; lingered again on gravelly reaches, wallowing in the sun; presently it gathered up its scattered rivulets and went on its way, scaly with scum like the iridescent dross on boiling lead, till, far away, the rippling rings spread and vanished, skinned and leaving behind them on the banks a white granulated cuticle of pebbles, a hide of ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... come within sight and sound of the delusive precincts, had gone to some busy commercial town with the sole object of making money by his wits, and thence surveyed his plan in true perspective. Well, all that was clear to him amounted to this, that the whole scheme had burst up, like an iridescent soap-bubble, under the touch of a reasoned inquiry. He looked back at himself along the vista of his past years, and his thought was akin ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... Eustace himself felt not only a renewed interest in the land exploited by his magic lantern, but he began to view all the rest of the world in a new and rosy light, of which Miss Lansdale was the iridescent globe that diffused and subdued it to ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... gratifications of natural scenery, painting, and poetry." In 'The Color Sense' he defines all that we do not owe to the color sense, for example the rainbow, the sunset, the sky, the green or purple sea, the rocks, the foliage of trees and shrubs, hues of autumn, effects of iridescent light, or tints of minerals and precious stones; and all that we do owe, namely, "the beautiful flowers of the meadow and the garden-roses, lilies, cowslips, and daisies; the exquisite pink of the apple, the peach, the mango, and the cherry, with all the diverse artistic wealth ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... on them as they entered the dining room. A long table was burdened with elaborate pagodas of spun barley sugar topped with sprigs of orange blossom, the moulded creams of a Charlotte Polonaise, champagne jelly valanced with lemon peel, pyramids of glazed fruits on lacquered plates; with faintly iridescent Belleek and fluted glass and ormolu; and, everywhere, the pale multitudinous flames of candles and the fuller radiance of astral lamps hung with lustres. Jasper Penny idly tore open a bon bon wrapped in a verse on ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... encompassed him, on the top of which the segment of a larger circle rested, forming a sort of heavy brilliant crown. At the bottom of the circle, and depending from it, was a mass of soft, glowing, iridescent vapor. On either side, like fragments of the larger circle, were two brilliant arcs. Altogether, it was the most portentous storm-breeding sun I ever beheld. In a dark hemlock wood in a valley, the owls were hooting ominously, and the crows dismally cawing. Before night the storm set in, a little ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... he says a thing like that," she said, looking at Jacob. "But I do. Sometimes I could kill myself. Sometimes he lies in bed all day long—just lies there. ... I don't want you right on the table"; she waved her hands. Swollen iridescent pigeons were waddling round ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... about. The wide, kite-like fins of rays, quivered in their sticky glue. But squid, squid, everywhere, the most valuable prey of all! The waters offshore seemed literally alive with squid! And the catch was tremendous. Basket after basket shone with masses of transparent iridescent crystal, the slimy crustaceans waving their tentacles desperately about, setting the black of their receptacles a-glitter with the soft ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... concentrated on the tiny iridescent and diamond-like crystals floating in the air. There was a very sober expression on his face. He only wished he could have been honestly of ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... in August with wild pinks. The water, though deep, is deliciously clear. At a depth of more than six feet you can distinguish the dead leaves at the bottom, the grass, the twigs, and here and there a stone's iridescent outline. They all lie asleep there, the waste of seasons gone by, soon to be covered by others in their turn. From time to time out of the depths of these submerged thickets an eft darts up. He comes circling up, quivering his yellowbanded tail, snatches a mouthful of air, and goes down ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... from her bud the playful Tulip breaks, And young Carnations peep with blushing cheeks; Bid the closed Petals from nocturnal cold 450 The virgin Style in silken curtains fold, Shake into viewless air the morning dews, And wave in light their iridescent hues; While from on high the bursting Anthers trust To the mild breezes their prolific dust; 455 Or bend in rapture o'er the central Fair, Love out their hour, and leave their lives in air. So in his silken sepulchre the Worm, Warm'd with new life, unfolds his larva-form; Erewhile aloft ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... and investors from one end of America to the other and throughout Europe were on the qui vive for the anticipated announcement. At intervals in history great "booms" are started, which bloom into iridescent bubbles, and for a moment dazzle the world with fairy dreams of sudden millions. Greatest of all these was the South Sea Bubble. Since then we have had the tulip craze in Holland, the Hooley excitement, and the ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... strange than they do a month earlier. In the Northern there was good business doing. The new bar fixtures, which had cost a king's ransom, or represented the one night's losings of a Klondike millionaire, shone rich, dark, and enticing, while the cut glass sparkled with iridescent hues, reflecting, in a measure, the prismatic moods, the dancing spirits of the crowd that crushed past, halting at the gambling games, or patronizing the theatre in the rear. The old bar furniture, brought down by dog team from ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... evening in a baffling, dreamlike oblivion to everything but his thoughts, and floated away to his room, feeling curiously light and iridescent. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... romance of the play were still warm and vital, in his imagination, infusing his thoughts with a roseate glamour of unreality, wherein all things were strangely possible. The iridescent imagery of the Arabian Nights of his boyhood (who has forgotten the fascination of those three fat old volumes of crabbed type, illuminated with their hundreds of cramped old wood-cuts?) had in a scant three hours been ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... and placed on a cast iron or tin plate heated to not more than 40 or 50 C. A gentle heat is quite sufficient to dry the albumen quickly; a greater heat would spoil it, as it would produce coagulation. So soon as the film is dry, which will be seen by the iridescent aspect it assumes, the plate is allowed to cool to the ordinary temperature, and is then at once exposed either beneath a positive, or beneath an original drawing the lines of which have been drawn in opaque ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... But the truth is much more commonplace. Merlin Grainger stood up and surveyed the wreck of the bookshop, the ruined volumes, the torn silk remnants of the once beautiful crimson lamp, the crystalline sprinkling of broken glass which lay in iridescent dust over the whole interior—and then he went to a corner where a broom was kept and began cleaning up and rearranging and, as far as he was able, restoring the shop to its former condition. He found that, though some few of the books were uninjured, most of them had suffered ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... that she wasn't cheap and easy; which would be a thing he couldn't possibly wish his future wife to have shown herself in advance, even if to him alone. That she could make him put himself such questions was precisely part of the attaching play of her iridescent surface, the shimmering interfusion of her various aspects; that of her youth with her independence—her pecuniary perhaps in particular, that of her vivacity with her beauty, that of her facility above all with her odd novelty; the high modernity, as people appeared to have come to call it, that ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... age. His latest book, with the stimulating title of They Went (CHAPMAN AND HALL), is an admirable example of this. Certainly no one else could have created this exotic city with its painted palaces and copper-encrusted towers, a vision of sea-mists and rainbows; or peopled it with so iridescent a company—the strange princess; the queen, her mother; the senile king who should have been (but wasn't) her father; Theophilus, the Greek artist; the philosophic old Druidess, and the dwarfs who "chanted squeaky hymns amid sacrifices of mushrooms and gold-dust." Perhaps this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... grey eyes wandered around the big studio where shadowy and strangely beautiful but incomprehensible things met her gaze, like iridescent, indefinite ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... more elysian than that which accompanies the waking moments on the morning after the great discovery. Leigh wandered for some time in this imaginary paradise, where everything seemed not only possible, but actually accomplished. His rising, however, shook some of these iridescent colours from his thoughts, until they gradually began to assume the more sober hue of fact, a change like that which he now discovered had come over ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... infinitudes of space and time, its systems of suns and planets, its seemingly endless forms of inorganic matter and organic life, shrivels up, on a close inspection, into a fleeting, a momentary figment of thought. It is like one of those glass baubles, iridescent with a thousand varied and delicate hues, which a single touch suffices to shatter into dust. The philosopher, like the sorcerer, has but to ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... grew thick and heavy with clouds. The water of the lake was like molten jewels, ruby and amethyst. The boat seemed floating in some strange, ethereal substance hitherto unknown to man—translucent and iridescent. The mountains loomed like dim purple pillars at the western gate of the world, and the rays of the half-hidden sun plunging athwart these sentinels sank deep into the shining flood. Later the sky cleared, and the inverted mountains in the lake were scarcely less vivid than ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... blue; iridescent silver underneath; pale blue dorsal; dark-blue fins and copper-bronze tail, with bright bars ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... construction. All about it the surface had been rent as by an earthquake, and save for a fragment of the dome or bombproof all trace of buildings had disappeared. A glistening lake of leperous-like molten lead lay in the centre of the crater, strangely iridescent. A broad path of destruction, fifty yards or so in width, led from the scene of the disruption to the precipice against which the Ray had played. The face of the cliff itself seemed covered with a white coating or powder which gave it a ghostly sheen. Moreover, the rain had ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... themselves here and there, slippery and treacherous. Very calm, confident through experience that there was not the slightest danger, Tartarin walked along the verge of the crevasses with their smooth, iridescent sides stretching downward indefinitely, and made his way among the seracs, solely intent on keeping up with the Swedish student, an intrepid walker, whose long gaiters with their silver buckles marched, thin and lank, ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... still, limpid water of the pool took on all sorts of strange and wonderful hues, like the iridescent surface of a pearl-shell. It grew very still and a little bit eery as the shadows crept over the scene, and it was a relief when Cas Temple and Bert Alley brought forth their mandolins. I am sorry to say that Titania's Mirror was a bit too thickly inhabited by mosquitoes for comfort, and there ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... coarse finger and thumb the proffered lustrous, delicately iridescent sphere, his shrewd ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... Upright in a blue-brocaded chair, elbows on its gilt arms, mother Swink surveyed me with scrutinizing calculation, and as she appraised I appraised also. Full-bosomed of body and short of leg, she looked close kin to a frog in her tight-fitting purple gown with its iridescent trimmings, and low-cut neck; and from her silver-buckled slippers to the crimped and russet-colored transformation on her head, which had slipped somewhat to one side, my eyes went up and then went down, and I ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... succession of tones and chords is sufficiently enjoyable, so long as each separate particle, each beat or measure, is euphonious in itself. The other class, more discriminating in its tastes, looks beneath this iridescent surface and strives to fathom the underlying purpose of it all; not content with the testimony of the ear alone, such hearers enlist the higher, nobler powers of Reason, and no amount of pleasant sounds could compensate them for the absence of well-ordered parts and their ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... a mischievous sly smile. "Yes, it is," she continued. "And, oh, Uncle Sey, where the restorer has—er—restored it, you know, it comes out in the photograph with a sort of brilliant iridescent metallic sheen ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... sweetness of Purcell's melody, I may have given a partially or totally wrong impression. Let me say at once, therefore, that delicate as he often was, and sweet as he was more often, although he could write melodies which are mere iridescent filaments of tone, he never became flabby or other than crisp, and could, and did, write themes as flexible, sinewy, unbreakable as perfectly tempered steel bands. And these themes he could lay together and weld into ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... should say was, by the way, because she's still living. But there's something—I don't know; it's rather difficult to explain—But you know how pouring champagne into a glass makes it froth up into a million iridescent little bubbles? Well, there was none of that in our married life. There was no fizz in it, no sparkle, no taste, phew! The days were all one color—flat and stale and gray as the devil. And that's why I wanted to get away and forget. You can't forget unless you play. So trying to play ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... itself all the more, probably, from the warmth of the manure heap on which it lay; but now, on our nearer approach, it raised its serpent-like head and, puffing out its creamy throat, grew in an instant to double its former size, while the beautiful iridescent colouring of its skin ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... like George, began presently to show the gloss of prosperity, the winter brought a continuous flashing stream of gaiety, in which Mrs. Fowler darted joyously about like some bright hungry minnow beneath the iridescent ripples of a brook. There were new rugs, new curtains, new gowns, new bonnets; and Gabriella was led compliantly from dressmaker to milliner, until she lost in the process her look of shabbiness and developed into the fashionable ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... trail, scolding incessantly as they waited to be frightened on to the next tree. Patches of sunlight flashed vivid contrasts in their black and white plumage, and set off in a splendor of changing color the green and purple and bronze of their iridescent feathering. A deer bounded away in a blur of tan and white, and a little farther on, a porcupine lumbered lazily into the scrub. It was good to be alive! What difference did it make which direction she chose? All she ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... beauty. Cynicism lies like a black mark across his pages. At last, in his bitterness, the philosopher tells us the whole universe is a mirage, and that yonder summer-making sun is a bubble that repeats its iridescent tints in the colors of the rainbow. Despair ate out his heart. He became the most miserable of men, and knew no freedom from sorrow and pain. And lo, now the man's philosophy has perished like a bubble, his influence has utterly disappeared, for his books are unread, while only ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... hour of noon light suddenly broke overhead. Beginning in a round patch inclosed in an iridescent halo, it spread swiftly, seeming to melt its way down through the thick, dark mass that choked the air, and in less than fifteen minutes New York and all its surroundings emerged into the ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... wonderful purity of the moonlight and the snow. The air is full of latent fire, and the cold warms me—after a different fashion from that of the kitchen-stove. The world lies about me in a "trance of snow." The clouds are pearly and iridescent, and seem the farthest possible remove from the condition of a storm,—the ghosts of clouds, the indwelling beauty freed from all dross. I see the hills, bulging with great drifts, lift themselves up cold and white against the sky, the black lines of fences here and there obliterated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... shadow that white mosaic of flower-crowned faces set in the amphitheatre of jet, and vast shadows dropped upon the high-flung tiers and shrouded them. But on the skirts of the rays the fretted stalls in which we sat with the fair-haired ones blazed out, iridescent, like jewels. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... complete series of experiments was made, the changes took place only at the moults, whether normal and annual or artificially induced at shorter periods. There was a corresponding increase in the choroidal pigment of the eye. At a certain advanced stage of feather pigmentation a brilliant iridescent bronze or green tint made its appearance on those areas where iridescence most often occurs in allied genera. Thus in birds no less than in insects, characters previously regarded as of taxonomic value, can be evoked or withheld by the forces ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... suffused a glamour of glowing color over the rich brocade of the walls of Marcus Gard's library, catching a glint here and there on iridescent plaques, or a mellow high light on the luscious patine of an antique bronze. The stillness, so characteristic of the place, seemed to isolate it from the whole world, save when a distant bell ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... know whether immunity to blight is a possibility or only an iridescent dream, so I made no charge for these scions. The only test of a pear seedling, the same as with the apple, is that of propagation. Furthermore, if you have but the one seedling tree you may lose it by ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... She had an iridescent personality, made up of sudden shynesses, of bright flashes of bravado, of tenderness and hauteur, and she contrived to be fascinating in all of them. She held Kate as the Ancient ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... hour of very difficult climbing we reached the lowest level of the crater, pretty nearly a mile across, presenting from above the appearance of a sea at rest, but on crossing it we found it to be an expanse of waves and convolutions of ashy-coloured lava, with huge cracks filled up with black iridescent rolls of lava, only a few weeks old. Parts of it are very rough and ridgy, jammed together like field ice, or compacted by rolls of lava which may have swelled up from beneath, but the largest part of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... summer-time of eighteen years ago, that had been Mary's,—and my heart beat fast as I looked upon the silent voicefulness that spake up to me, and said, "To you, who have restored him to himself, he offers the same tribute;" and I lifted up the iridescent, flashing cradle of margarite, and reverently touched the ashes of althea it held with my lips. Afterwards they were salt,—whether with the saltness of the sea the bud had been baptized in, or of the tears that I let ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... XI. PHYSICS.—Iridescent Crystals.—By LORD RAYLEIGH.—An abstract of a lecture by the distinguished physicist, detailing some interesting experiments applicable to the colored reflection observed in crystals of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... with admiration for the iridescent stones that was particularly feminine. Then, picking up a splendid bracelet and slipping it upon her wrist, she added, "Look! Isn't this marvellous? The gems are larger than I ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... of a softer nature, are such as Alcyonium and Pennatula. All these belong to the "class" Actinozoa. There are other coelenterates of an active free-swimming habit, such as Beroee and Cydippe, which are balls of glassy transparency displaying iridescent hues as they move rapidly through the water by means of ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... as thou first didst know her, A loveliness to tempt or saint or devil, The rare quintessence of pure womanhood! Transparent brightness! A living crystal globe, Wherein all beauties of humanity Reflect themselves with iridescent glow! Dost thou remember? Behold her now the mother of ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... force it open with the blade of his knife, no doubt fully expecting to find at least one pearl of price in it. But, alas! the poor man was doomed to disappointment, for there was no sign or vestige of pearl in the fish, save the lovely iridescent lining of the two shells. A second attempt fared no better, and the disappointed seeker flung the shells far from him with a muttered something that sounded not unlike an imprecation. But the good man was not to be so easily put off. A third oyster was seized and savagely wrenched ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... man's modern concepts of art and god. From the striker king-post, were suspended ropes of climbers to which men could apply their strength and direction. Like a battering ram, this king-post could be driven end-onward against the mighty red-iridescent sphere. ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... we had a few living species around here? Regular scarabs. Kathleen and I found three the other day—one a regular beauty with two rhinoceros horns on the thorax and iridescent green and copper tinted wing-covers. Do you want to help me hunt for some more? You'll have to put on overshoes, ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... wit and incisive sarcasm set the tone for the feuilleton literature of all Mid-Europe. By their very isolation they were enabled to regard men and affairs with a certain detachment, and both wrote with an iridescent insolence which can only be described by the Jewish technical word Chutzpah. Treitschke complained of their frequent irreverences and flippancies but in both respects Heine, "the wittiest Frenchman since Voltaire," was merely following in the footsteps of his predecessor, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... the exposure, he sent to me through Mr. Weston, who called upon me for the purpose on April 15, the following unspeakable document, apparently without a suspicion that it pricked the bubble of his previous iridescent pledge to "ask ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... to these southern seas that the millionaire brings his yacht for a winter cruise; it will be in these forests that he hunts for wild boar and deer, or shoots woodcock, duck, snipe, pigeons, and pheasants; in these waters that he fishes for the iridescent silver beauties that here abound. It will be on these sunlit shores invalids seeking health will find it, and here that huge sanitariums should be built, for despite the tales of pessimistic travellers, no lovelier climate ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... more of it than had been his wont for many seasons. The two young-lady cousins whom he had brought and installed in his home thirsted for that gorgeous, nocturnal moth life in which no thirst is truly slaked, and dragged him with them into the iridescent, gas-lighted ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... English, or more probably of Scotch parents settled in Paris, where he was born in 1687. All we know of his earlier years is to be found in a single sparkling page of d'Alembert, who makes Moncrif float out of obscurity like the most elegant of iridescent bubbles. He was handsome and seductive, turned a copy of verses with the best of gentlemen, but was particularly distinguished by the art with which he purveyed little dramas for the amateur stage, then so much in fashion in France. ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... decaying vegetable tissue below. In the Bay of Marquette, two or three miles north of the town, where the shore is a peat bog underlain by Archan rocks, I have seen bubbles of carbureted hydrogen rising in great numbers attended by drops of petroleum which spread as iridescent films on ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... table in her splendid salon, a company of rustling, iridescent fops in satin and heavy periwigs, and of ladies with curled head-dresses and bare shoulders, played at basset one night in January. Conversation rippled, breaking here and there into laughter, white, jewelled hands reached ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... cannot be doubted that several symbolic motives are inwoven into the iridescent fabric of the play. But it is a great mistake to regard it as essentially and inseparably a piece of symbolism. Essentially it is a history of a sickly conscience, worked out in terms of pure psychology. Or rather, it is a study of a sickly and a robust conscience side by side. ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... hardest of all. Think! Imagine one of those serene, iridescent rings of land, moored close beside the cliff, at which the waves never rest from beating. Could the one forever at peace, with leave from wind and wave to grow its verdure and twine its tendrils ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... Bubble rose to dazzle all eyes with its iridescent splendours, it was she more than any other who blew it. She was the witch behind the scenes of the South Sea and many another bubble Company, whether its object was to "carry on a thing that will turn to the advantage of the concerned," "the breeding and providing ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... whirling round the outskirts of the storm. Observe how scores of them are yet involved in the fading streams of the nebulous spirals; see how they have been thrown into vast loops and curves, of a beauty that half redeems the terror of the spectacle enclosed within their lines — like iridescent cirri hovering about the edges of a hurricane. And so again ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... gentle rain fell I glided in a barge down a sunless stream under the earth till I reached another world of purple twilight, iridescent arbours and undying roses. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... distance. The technique had not improved, the material clothing becomes subject to the mental conception, thus are eschewed chic of touch and surface texture. The colour is indescribable: it pertains neither to earth nor to heaven, and yet it has more of dull clay than of iridescent light. What a misfortune that the gem-like lustre of the early Italians escaped this modern disciple! A thoroughly characteristic letter accompanied the picture. Overbeck having shut himself out from the world, seeks for his creations a like seclusion. He writes to Raczynski: ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... in this room. The iron pillar that he had seen came through the floor and terminated some five feet above it in another of the opaque glass domes, filled with iridescent fire. About it was a complicated arrangement ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... and low tide, they forded the creek and swung up off the beach to breathe the sweating ponies in the deep shade of a mango tree that spread high above the surrounding brush. Dismounting, they stood as in a huge green bowl: its bottom the smooth waters of the gulf, iridescent under a zenith sun and framed as far as the eye could reach with a slant of parched beach; the sides of the vast concavity were formed by the verdant mat of jungled slopes that rose with ever increasing abruptness to the ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... toy were symbolical of life, that toy was a kaleidoscope: the showy bits of tinsel, coloured glass, silk, beads, and feathers, with here and there perchance a stray piece of iridescent ore or a pin, each, in its turn of ideal multiplication, filling successively the field of vision; the trifling touch that will disenchant the fairest patterns; the slightest change, as in chemical arithmetic, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Egyptian, Chinese, Russian, and Greek.) We bathed and dressed, and went down to dine in a circular dining-room with inlaid marble walls, and doors of carved, open-work bronze that have transparent enamel, like iridescent shell let into the openings. It is the first house I have seen big enough to make the Goodrich family look small, and the girls screamed with admiration in the dining-room; but Peter Storm laughed at the whole house. He said he ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... the palaces of light in the Exposition grounds below us burst into radiance. The Horticultural dome turned to a wonderful iridescent bubble and the Tower of Jewels caught and reflected the light that played upon it. Wide bands of color streaked the sombre sky, transforming the clouds to shades of violet, yellow and rose. "The rainbow colors of promise," ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... that hour, she came to that second birth all women know; she was born into that world of drifting sweet odours, blending and iridescent colours, evasive and enchanting sounds, that is the kingdom of the heart. Julia did not know why, from this hour on, she was no longer a little girl, she was no longer dumb and blind and unseeing. But a new and delightful consciousness ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... upon any pigment in the substance of the feathers, but upon the way the light strikes them. It is the same with the beautiful tints we see on a soap-bubble. The film of water itself is colorless, but it becomes iridescent. You might divide all the colors of birds into two classes—those that depend upon pigments in the feathers, and those that depend upon the play of light on ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... big, and more beautiful than you can possibly imagine—for they were soft and smooth, and every feather lay neatly in its place. And the feathers were of the most lovely mixed changing colors, like the rainbow, or iridescent glass, or the beautiful scum that sometimes floats on water that is not at ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... was now defining itself more clearly. Somewhere, not very far ahead and slightly to the left, a globe of the faintest iridescent luminosity seemed suspended in the brewing and waving mist. The horses turned at right angles on to the bridge, the glimmer swinging round to the other side of the buggy. Their hoofs struck wood, and both beasts snorted ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm, delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors, maintained in the face of imminent destruction.... In that category none was sharper than the charm of a woman, soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly." It is as the poet musing upon the fleet passage of beauty rather than as the satirist mocking at the vanity of human wishes that Mr. Hergesheimer traces the career of Linda Condon; but both poet and satirist meet in ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren |
